LITTLE MUSIC THEATER IN BRNO - HISTORY OF CULTURAL-EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

The history of the Little Music Theater in Brno has been an unexplored area so far. This paper is based on long time source research and extensive interviews with contemporaries.

Little music theaters were very common in Czechoslovakia in the second half of 20th century. They aimed mainly at improving communication of a particular institution with the public, exactly according to the Communist Party requirements. In Brno, the second largest city of the present day Czech Republic, the Little Music Theater was founded as a part of the Moravian Museum in 1962 and it successfully pursued its activities even after the Velvet Revolution (1989) until 1995. Restrainedly it was run as an evening institute of musicology where professors, associate professors and doctors, particularly from the Brno Institute of Musicology but also other experts, gave lectures. The theater presented not only artificial music but also, against regulations of the Communist Party, non-artificial music including American musicals. The theater ceased its operation in 1995, however, immediately after that without any explanation a little music theater was founded under another institution bearing the same name, having the same program orientation and employing the same performance authors. This theater is still active in Brno nowadays.

The paper aims at revealing so far nearly unknown history of an important cultural-educational institution in Brno as a phenomenon among other little music theaters in Czechoslovakia.